Last November, sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling addressed police and private
security officers at the High Technology Crime Investigation Association. The
transcript of his talk has been edited for Wired. The best thing that
can be said for the speech, Sterling quips, is that it allowed "American law
enforcement personnel to receive training credits for sitting still and
listening to it."

My name is Bruce Sterling, and I'm a sometime computer crime journalist and a
longtime science fiction writer from Austin, Texas. I'm the guy who wrote
Hacker Crackdown, which is the book you're getting on one of those floppy disks
that are being distributed at this gig like party favors.

People in law enforcement often ask me, Mr. Sterling, if you're a science
fiction writer like you say you are, then why should you care about American
computer police and private security? And also, how come my kids can never find
any copies of your sci-fi novels? Well, as to the second question, my
publishers do their best. As to the first, the truth is that I've survived my
brief career as a computer-crime journalist. I'm now back to writing science
fiction full time, like I want to do and like I ought to do. I really can't
help the rest of it.

So why did I write Hacker Crackdown in the first place? Well, I figured that
somebody ought to do it, and nobody else was willing. When I first got
interested in Operation Sundevil and the Legion of Doom and the raid on Steve
Jackson Games and so forth, it was 1990. All these issues were very obscure. It
was the middle of the Bush presidency. There was no information-superhighway
vice president. There was no Wired magazine. There was no Electronic
Frontier Foundation. There was no Clipper Chip and no Digital Telephony
Initiative. There was no PGP and no World Wide Web. There were a few books
around, and a couple of movies, that glamorized computer crackers, but there
had never been a popular book written about American computer cops.

When I got started researching Hacker Crackdown, my first and only nonfiction
book, I didn't even think I was going to write it. There were four other
journalists hot on the case who were all better qualified than I was. But one
by one, they all dropped out. Eventually, I realized that either I was going to
write it, or nobody was ever going to tell the story. All those strange events
and peculiar happenings would have passed without a public record. I couldn't
help but feel that if I didn't take the trouble to tell people what had
happened, it would probably have to happen all over again. And again and again,
until people finally noticed it and were willing to talk about it publicly.

Nowadays it's different. There are about a million journalists with Internet
addresses. There are other books around, like for instance Katie Hafner and
John Markoff's Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, which
is a far better book about hackers than my book. Paul Mungo and Bryan Clough's
book Approaching Zero has a pretty interesting take on the European virus
scene. Then there's Cyberspace and the Law by Edward Cavazos and Gavino Morin,
which is a good practical handbook on digital civil-liberties issues. This book
explains in legal detail exactly what kind of modem stunts are likely to get
you into trouble. (This is a useful service for keeping people out of hot
water, which is what my book was intended to do. Only this book does it
better.) And there have been a lot of magazine and newspaper articles
published.

Basically, I'm no longer needed as a computer-crime journalist. The world is
full of computer journalists now, and the stuff I was writing about four years
ago is hot and sexy and popular. That's why I don't have to write it anymore. I
was ahead of my time. I'm supposed to be ahead of my time. I'm a science
fiction writer. Believe it or not, I'm needed to write science fiction. Taking
a science fiction writer and turning him into a journalist is like stealing
pencils from a blind man's cup.

Even though I'm not in the computer-crime game anymore, I do maintain an
interest. For a lot of pretty good reasons. I still read most of the
computer-crime journal-ism that's out there. And I'll tell you one thing about
it: there's way, way too much blather going on about teenage computer
intruders, and nowhere near enough coverage of computer cops. Computer cops are
at least a hundred times more interesting than sneaky teenagers with kodes and
kards. A guy like Carlton Fitzpatrick - a telecom crime instructor at the
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia - should be a
hundred times more famous than some wretched hacker kid like Mark Abene. A
group like the Federal Computer Investigations Committee is a hundred times
more influential and important and interesting than the Chaos Computer Club,
Hack-Tic, and the 2600 group put together.

Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.sf.ca.us) is the author of five science fiction novels, the nonfiction work The Hacker Crackdown, and co-author, with William Gibson, of The Difference Engine.